In the following essay, James analyzes the polarity of individualism versus conformity. He compares Looking Backward to other utopian novels, gives an overview of the philosophies of progress and individualism over the centuries, illustrates this polarity in Looking Backward in comparison to Karl Marx's ideas, and asserts that there must be a balance of this polarity to prevent a “short-circuiting of the dynamic of freedom.”

In the essay that follows, Sancton examines Bellamy's religious and philosophical views as they are expressed in Looking Backward.

In the essay that follows, Lipow locates the popularity of Bellamy's anti-democratic ideas in more general political trends among the middle class of the late nineteenth-century, particularly in the desire for economic reform of “big capital.”

In the following essay, McHugh demonstrates the connection between Looking Backward and the Populist party and avers that Edward Bellamy's novel contained the ideal world the agrarians sought while the Populist party was the means to fight for this new world.

In the following essay, Roemer alleges that Bellamy's use of the conventions of domestic fiction contributed to the popularity of Looking Backward among nineteenth-century readers.

In the following essay, Jehmlich investigates the problem of labor as it is addressed in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and examines the novel's influence on subsequent utopian treatments of this problem.

In the following essay, Samuels analyzes some of the main concepts in Looking Backward and concludes that they are still relevant 100 years later because society continues to face the same systemic economic and social problems and beliefs.

In the following essay, White asserts that Looking Backward is an important and unique novel in American literature and explores the three main elements that he believes contribute to its popularity: namely, that it is a romantic novel, that it portrays a realistic criticism of society, and that it dramatizes the concept of equality.

In the following essay, Hartman traces the evolutionary views of Charles S. Peirce and Edward Bellamy through their various publications and declares that both shared the idea that love is the great agent in evolutionary progress.

In the following essay, Widdicombe claims that the literary devices in Looking Backward and Equality undermine Edward Bellamy's message.

In the following essay, Gardiner contends that the form and structure of Looking Backward were perhaps more instrumental in generating a movement toward social reform than was the implied comparison between nineteenth-century Boston and Boston in the year 2000.

In the following essay, Khanna discusses Edward Bellamy's early utopian fiction in order to highlight the tension between “theory and praxis” in Looking Backward.

In the following essay, Becker traces the relationship between materialism and social equality in Looking Backward and presents some of the opposing arguments to Bellamy's ideas.

In the following essay, Connor correlates Bellamy's utopist ideas and some millenialist religious movements.

In the following essay, Khanna contends that the popularity of Looking Backward is founded on the text's sophisticated projection of an ideal reader, a process that mirrors the narrator's journey to a utopian society.

In the following essay, Halewood charges that the same characteristics of Looking Backward that made it popular with nineteenth-century readers would render the novel unappealing to a twentieth-century audience.

In the following essay, Filler examines the social and religious unrest in the late 1800s and maintains that Looking Backward may have been a catalyst of political reform by which a unification of the social and economic classes was achieved.

In the following essay, Matarese proposes that Looking Backward was popular in part because it was consistent with the ideals inherent in America's unique national identity.

In the following essay, originally published in the Ladies Home Journal in April 1894, Bellamy explains how he formulated his ideas about social reform and why he chose the novel form to express these ideas.

In the following essay, originally published in The Nationalist in May 1890, Bellamy describes how Looking Backward evolved from his original writings of an ideal fantasy place with a social system maintained by an industrialized army to that of a utopian romance novel.

In the following excerpt, the critic discusses the perceived inadequacies of Bellamy's comparison of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries through an analysis of the characters and plot, suggesting that the main flaw in the socialist utopia is that Bellamy ignores the factor of human nature.

In the following review of the 1931 edition of Looking Backward, Forbes disagrees with the ideas expressed in Heywood Broun's introduction to the edition, and states that the importance of Looking Backward should not be found in its accurate predictions, but in the fact that the utopian idealist novel, a form of escapist literature at the time, was part of a large movement resulting from the social and economic problems of the last two decades of the 1800s.